Well, first thing first. This blog may be little bit immoral even if it is not illegal by the provider terms of service. So, if you read this or later sentences, the responsibilities are on you.

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I am going to share an idea that I’ve personally used a bit ago (2009) in my previous office to monitor the server and get notified when any server/service is down. I wrote a small PHP application that would do the tasks. Though I planned that time to blog about it, apparently, I forgot about it. The steps of the idea is:

A php chunk checks server status

If it finds something unexpected (or may be expected; depends on your logic :)) it creates an event in your google calendar which is due just 1-3 minutes from now

If your SMS alert is setup in Google Calender, Google will email you about the event.

Here I will not show how to write a PHP script to monitor server. I just told it as I applied this idea for same purpose. I guess you will get lots if you google it. However, the initial version that I developed just checked site’s homepage (using CURL) and if they were returning 200 response within a sensible time limit. If the response was not 200, it would create the event for me.

How to create Event?

It’s very simple. First of all download the following classes from phpclasses.org